by Alice Munro
“That’s it, that’s just it, though, you don’t get the opportunity! You’re a woman and life only goes in one direction for a woman. All this business about younger lovers, that’s just froth, isn’t it? Do you want a younger lover?”
“I guess not,” I say, and pick my dessert from a tray. I pick a rich creamy pudding with pureed chestnuts at the bottom of it and fresh raspberries on top. I purposely ate a light dinner, leaving plenty of room for dessert. I did that so I could have something to look forward to, while listening to Dennis.
“A women your age can’t compete,” says Dennis urgently. “You can’t compete with younger women. I used to think that was so rottenly unfair.”
“It’s probably biologically correct for men to go after younger women. There’s no use whining about it.”
“So the men have this way of renewing themselves, they get this refill of vitality, while the women are you might say removed from life. I used to think that was terrible. But now my thinking has undergone a complete reversal. Do you know what I think now? I think women are the lucky ones! Do you know why?”
“Why?”
“Because they are forced to live in the world of loss and death! Oh, I know, there’s face-lifting, but how does that really help? The uterus dries up. The vagina dries up.”
I feel him watching me. I continue eating my pudding.
“I’ve seen so many parts of the world and so many strange things and so much suffering. It’s my conclusion now that you won’t get any happiness by playing tricks on life. It’s only by natural renunciation and by accepting deprivation, that we prepare for death and therefore that we get any happiness. Maybe my ideas seem strange to you?”
I can’t think of anything to say.
8
Often I have a few lines of a poem going through my head, and I won’t know what started it. It can be a poem or rhyme that I didn’t even know I knew, and it needn’t be anything that conforms to what I think is my taste. Sometimes I don’t pay any attention to it, but if I do, I can usually see that the poem, or the bit of it I’ve got hold of, has some relation to what is going on in my life. And that may not be what seems to be going on.
For instance last spring, last autumn in Australia, when I was happy, the line that would go through my head, at a merry clip, was this:
“Even such is time, that takes in trust—”
I could not go on, though I knew trust rhymed with dust, and that there was something further along about “and in the dark and silent grave, shuts up the story of our days.” I knew the poem was written by Sir Walter Raleigh on the eve of his execution. My mood did not accord with such a poem and I said it, in my head, as if it was something pretty and lighthearted. I did not stop to wonder what it was doing in my head in the first place.
And now that I’m trying to look at things soberly I should remember what we said when our bags were packed and we were waiting for the taxi. Inside the bags our clothes that had shared drawers and closet space, tumbled together in the wash, and been pegged together on the clothesline where the kookaburras sat, were all sorted and separated and would not rub together any more.
“In a way I’m glad it’s over and nothing spoiled it. Things are so often spoiled.”
“I know.”
“As it is, it’s been perfect.”
I said that. And that was a lie. I had cried once, thought I was ugly, thought he was bored. But he said, “Perfect.”
On the plane the words of the poem were going through my head again, and I was still happy. I went to sleep thinking the bulk of X was still beside me and when I woke I filled the space quickly with memories of his voice, looks, warmth, our scenes together.
I was swimming in memories, at first. Those detailed, repetitive scenes were what buoyed me up. I didn’t try to escape them, didn’t wish to. Later I did wish to. They had become a plague. All they did was stir up desire, and longing, and hopelessness, a trio of miserable caged wildcats that had been installed in me without my permission, or at least without my understanding how long they would live and how vicious they would be. The images, the language, of pornography and romance are alike; monotonous and mechanically seductive, quickly leading to despair. That was what my mind dealt in; that is what it still can deal in. I have tried vigilance and reading serious books but I can still slide deep into some scene before I know where I am.
On the bed a woman lies in a yellow nightgown which has not been torn but has been pulled off her shoulders and twisted up around her waist so that it covers no more of her than a crumpled scarf would. A man bends over her, naked, offering a drink of water. The woman, who has almost lost consciousness, whose legs are open, arms flung out, head twisted to the side as if she has been struck down in the course of some natural disaster—this woman rouses herself and tries to hold the glass in her shaky hands. She slops water over her breast, drinks, shudders, falls back. The man’s hands are trembling, too. He drinks out of the same glass, looks at her, and laughs. His laugh is rueful, apologetic, and kind, but it is also amazed, and his amazement is not far from horror. How are we capable of all this? his laugh says, what is the meaning of it?
He says, “We almost finished each other off.”
The room seems still full of echoes of the recent commotion, the cries, pleas, brutal promises, the climactic sharp announcements and the long subsiding spasms.
The room is brimming with gratitude and pleasure, a rich broth of love, a golden twilight of love. Yes, yes, you can drink the air.
You see the sort of thing I mean, that is my torment.
9
This is the time of year when women are tired of sundresses, prints, sandals. It is already fall in the stores. Thick sweaters and skirts are pinned up against black or plum-colored velvet. The young salesgirls are made up like courtesans. I’ve become feverishly preoccupied with clothes. All the conversations in the stores make sense to me.
“The neckline doesn’t work. It’s too stark. I need a flutter. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes. I know what you mean.”
“I want something very classy and very provocative. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes. I know exactly what you mean.”
For years I’ve been wearing bleached-out colors which I suddenly can’t bear. I buy a deep-red satin blouse, a purple shawl, a dark-blue skirt. I get my hair cut and pluck my eyebrows and try a lilac lipstick, a brownish rouge. I’m appalled to think of the way I went around in Australia, in a faded wraparound cotton skirt and T-shirt, my legs bare because of the heat, my face bare too and sweating under a cotton hat. My legs with the lumps of veins showing. I’m half convinced that a more artful getup would have made a more powerful impression, more dramatic clothes might have made me less discardable. I have fancies of meeting X unexpectedly at a party or on a Toronto street, and giving him a shock, devastating him with my altered looks and late-blooming splendor. But I do think you have to watch out, even in these garish times; you have to watch out for the point at which the splendor collapses into absurdity. Maybe they are all watching out, all the old women I see on Queen Street: the fat woman with pink hair; the eighty-year-old with painted-on black eyebrows; they may all be thinking they haven’t gone too far yet, not quite yet. Even the buttercup woman I saw a few days ago on the streetcar, the little, stout, sixtyish woman in a frilly yellow dress well above the knees, a straw hat with yellow ribbons, yellow pumps dyed-to-match on her little fat feet—even she doesn’t aim for comedy. She sees a flower in the mirror: the generous petals, the lovely buttery light.
I go looking for earrings. All day looking for earrings which I can see so clearly in my mind. I want little filigree balls of silver, of diminishing size, dangling. I want old and slightly tarnished silver. It’s a style I well remember; you’d think the secondhand stores would be sure to have them. But I can’t find them, I can’t find anything resembling them, and they seem more and more necessary. I go into a little shop on a side street near College and Spadina. The shop is al
l done up in black paper with cheap, spooky effects—for instance a bald, naked mannequin sitting on a stepladder, dangling some beads. A dress such as I wore in the fifties, a dance dress of pink net and sequins, terribly scratchy under the arms, is displayed against the black paper in a way that makes it look sinister, and desirable.
I look around for the tray of jewelry. The salesgirls are busy dressing a customer hidden from me by a three-way mirror. One salesgirl is fat and gypsyish with a face warmly colored as an apricot. The other is spiky and has a crest of white hair surrounded by black haft, like a skunk. They are shrieking with pleasure as they bring hats and beads for the customer to try. Finally everybody is satisfied and a beautiful young lady, who is not a young lady at all but a pretty boy dressed up as a lady, emerges from the shelter of the mirror. He is wearing a black velvet dress with long sleeves and a black lace yoke; black pumps and gloves; a little black hat with a dotted veil. He is daintily and discreetly made up; he has a fringe of brown curls; he is the prettiest and most ladylike person I have seen all day. His smiling face is tense and tremulous. I remember how when I was ten or eleven years old I used to dress up as a bride in old curtains, or as a lady in rouge and a feathered hat. After all the effort and contriving and my own enchantment with the finished product there was a considerable letdown. What are you supposed to do now? Parade up and down on the sidewalk? There is a great fear and daring and disappointment in this kind of display.
He has a boyish, cracking voice. He is brash and timid. “How do I look, momma?”
“You look very nice.”
10
I am at a low point. I can recognize it. That must mean I will get past it.
I am at a low point, certainly. I cannot deal with all that assails me unless I get help and there is only one person I want help from and that is X. I can’t continue to move my body along the streets unless I exist in his mind and in his eyes. People have this problem frequently, and we know it is their own fault and they have to change their way of thinking, that’s all. It is not an honorable problem. Love is not serious though it may be fatal. I read that somewhere and I believe it. Thank God I don’t know where he is. I can’t telephone him, write letters to him, waylay him on the street.
A man I had broken with used to follow me. Finally he persuaded me to go into a café and have a cup of tea with him.
“I know what a spectacle I am,” he said. “I know if you did have any love left for me this would destroy it.”
I said nothing.
He beat the spoon against the sugar bowl.
“What do you think of, when you’re with me?”
I meant to say, “I don’t know,” but instead I said, “I think of how much I want to get away.”
He reared up trembling and dropped the spoon on the floor. “You’re free of me,” he said in a choking voice.
This is the scene both comic and horrible, stagy and real. He was in desperate need, as I am now, and I didn’t pity him, and I’m not sorry I didn’t.
11
I have had a pleasant dream that seems far away from my waking state. X and I and some other people I didn’t know or can’t remember were wearing innocent athletic underwear outfits, which changed at some point into gauzy bright white clothes, and these turned out to be not just clothes but our substances, our flesh and bones and in a sense our souls. Embraces took place which started out with the usual urgency but were transformed, by the lightness and sweetness of our substance, into a rare state of content. I can’t describe it very well, it sounds like a movie-dream of heaven, all banality and innocence. So I suppose it was. I can’t apologize for the banality of my dreams.
12
I go along the street to Rooneem’s Bakery and sit at one of their little tables with a cup of coffee. Rooneem’s is an Estonian bakery where you can usually find a Mediterranean housewife in a black dress, a child looking at the cakes, and a man talking to himself.
I sit where I can watch the street. I have a feeling X is somewhere in the vicinity. Within a thousand miles, say, within a hundred miles, within this city. He doesn’t know my address but he knows I am in Toronto. It would not be so difficult to find me.
At the same time I’m thinking that I have to let go. What you have to decide, really, is whether to be crazy or not, and I haven’t the stamina, the pure, seething will, for prolonged craziness.
There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around a house. You can’t know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you’ve reached it. I believe this.
When you start really letting go this is what it’s like. A lick of pain, furtive, darting up where you don’t expect it. Then a lightness. The lightness is something to think about. It isn’t just relief. There’s a queer kind of pleasure in it, not a self-wounding or malicious pleasure, nothing personal at all. It’s an uncalled-for pleasure in seeing how the design wouldn’t fit and the structure wouldn’t stand, a pleasure in taking into account, all over again, everything that is contradictory and persistent and unaccommodating about life. I think so. I think there’s something in us wanting to be reassured about all that, right alongside—and at war with—whatever there is that wants permanent vistas and a lot of fine talk.
I think about my white dream and how it seemed misplaced. It strikes me that misplacement is the clue, in love, the heart of the problem, but like somebody drunk or high I can’t quite get a grasp on what I see.
What I need is a rest. A deliberate sort of rest, with new definitions of luck. Not the sort of luck Dennis was talking about. You’re lucky to be sitting in Rooneem’s drinking coffee, with people coming and going, eating and drinking, buying cakes, speaking Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and other languages that you can try to identify.
13
Kay is back from the country. She too has a new outfit, a dark-green schoolgirl’s tunic worn without a blouse or brassiere. She has dark-green knee socks and saddle oxfords.
“Does it look kinky?”
“Yes it does.”
“Does it make my arms look dusky? Remember in some old poem a woman had dusky arms?”
Her arms do look soft and brown.
“I meant to get down on Sunday but Roy came over with a friend and we all had a corn roast. It was lovely. You should come out there. You should.”
“Some day I will.”
“The kids ran around like beautiful demons and we drank up the mead. Roy knows how to make fertility dolls. Roy’s friend is Alex Walther, the anthropologist. I felt I should have known about him but I didn’t. He didn’t mind. He’s a nice man. Do you know what he did? After dark when we were sitting around the fire he came over to me and just sighed, and laid his head on my lap. I thought it was such a nice simple thing to do. Like a St. Bernard. I’ve never had anybody do that before.”
Prue
Prue used to live with Gordon. This was after Gordon had left his wife and before he went back to her—a year and four months in all. Some time later, he and his wife were divorced. After that came a period of indecision, of living together off and on; then the wife went away to New Zealand, most likely for good.
Prue did not go back to Vancouver Island, where Gordon had met her when she was working as a dining-room hostess in a resort hotel. She got a job in Toronto, working in a plant shop. She had many friends in Toronto by that time, most of them Gordon’s friends and his wife’s friends. They liked Prue and were ready to feel sorry for her, but she laughed them out of it. She is very likable. She has what eastern Canadians call an English accent, though she was born in Canada—in Duncan, on Vancouver Island. This accent helps her to say the most cynical things in a winning and lighthearted way. She presents her life in anecdotes, and though it is the point of most of her anecdotes that hopes are dashed, dreams ridiculed, things never turn out as expected, everything is altered in a bizarre way and there is no explanation ever, people always feel cheered up
after listening to her; they say of her that it is a relief to meet somebody who doesn’t take herself too seriously, who is so unintense, and civilized, and never makes any real demands or complaints.
The only thing she complains about readily is her name. Prue is a schoolgirl, she says, and Prudence is an old virgin; the parents who gave her that name must have been too shortsighted even to take account of puberty. What if she had grown a great bosom, she says, or developed a sultry look? Or was the name itself a guarantee that she wouldn’t? In her late forties now, slight and fair, attending to customers with a dutiful vivacity, giving pleasure to dinner guests, she might not be far from what those parents had in mind: bright and thoughtful, a cheerful spectator. It is hard to grant her maturity, maternity, real troubles.
Her grownup children, the products of an early Vancouver Island marriage she calls a cosmic disaster, come to see her, and instead of wanting money, like other people’s children, they bring presents, try to do her accounts, arrange to have her house insulated. She is delighted with their presents, listens to their advice, and, like a flighty daughter, neglects to answer their letters.
Her children hope she is not staying on in Toronto because of Gordon. Everybody hopes that. She would laugh at the idea. She gives parties and goes to parties; she goes out sometimes with other men. Her attitude toward sex is very comforting to those of her friends who get into terrible states of passion and jealousy, and feel cut loose from their moorings. She seems to regard sex as a wholesome, slightly silly indulgence, like dancing and nice dinners—something that shouldn’t interfere with people’s being kind and cheerful to each other.
Now that his wife is gone for good, Gordon comes to see Prue occasionally, and sometimes asks her out for dinner. They may not go to a restaurant; they may go to his house. Gordon is a good cook. When Prue or his wife lived with him he couldn’t cook at all, but as soon as he put his mind to it he became—he says truthfully—better than either of them.
